IAAPA 2021: Men In Black, Jumanji & VR Agent To Debut At Sega’s Booth

IAAPA is a little under a month away, and that means we’re starting to receive some news on the latest games that will debut at the world’s largest tradeshow for amusements & arcades.

Our first wave of news comes from Sega Amusements, where they have mentioned three new titles that will appear at the event (as mentioned in the headline). Granted, these three will not be the only “new” games at the show, as they will also have Mission: Impossible Arcade and the recently mentioned Jet Blaster from Wahlap.

Note: In the cases of both Men In Black and Jumanji, it’s very possible that there are major or minor cabinet changes from what you see below. These photos are simply the latest examples I have of the games, but they are a bit old, so don’t pass final judgment on what you see!

Men In Black

I first heard about this one back in 2019, although there was no more information to share apart from the name and that it was primarily a videmption game. The title showed up on location test in Texas this past January, but we only saw the test piece in the background of another location test game. At least we know it’s a mounted gun game, but the rest is up in the air. Here’s an angled look at the game from the location test version:

Jumanji

When I first heard about this game appearing test through Jdevy, I mistakenly thought it was a variation of Team Play’s Jumanji, which had never been released; also from the cabinet design, I thought it might be an Adrenaline game, as it shared similarities with Rampage. Turns out that the license found it’s way over to Sega, who came up with their own interpretation of the recently rebooted film. This 2019 pic from a location test at a Superbowl UK site shows how 1-4 players could play for tickets on a single button game.

There was also some kind of scanner or mini-screen above each button (those black rectangles), but no clue what those might be, or if they even will be in the final version. It’s also impossible to tell what the gameplay is like from this pic, but again, it could have wildly changed since then – either way, Sega themselves state in their IAAPA’21 literature that it will be there (barring any kind of last minute change, like they did recently with ATV Slam SD).

VR Agent

First debuting in Asia at AAA 2021 with Wahlap, VR Agent is another piece that Sega is exclusively carrying and co-developing for the West with a Hong Kong-based company called 3MindWave, who also developed the software of ATV Slam and Jumanji above. This time they’re responsible for most of that as well as the cabinet and hardware too, although Sega still provided some development support.

As it goes, Sega hasn’t done much with VR themselves, although if you go waaaay back, there was the unreleased Tecwar/Netmerc that was being developed in conjunction with Virtuality. I believe there have been other experiments here and there, but nothing that really stands out as noteworthy. The most recent of those was Zero Latency being installed at the Tokyo Joypolis, although I don’t think that really counts as Sega handling it either as such.

As for this game, it is a light-gun shooter where the VR goggles are held to your face, which reminds me of the old Vortek V3. I’ll let the description from the website fill you in:

VR Agent supports games up to 4 player co-op where you can share the joy of fighting and strategic co-operations with other players to complete missions one after another.

VR Agent game features:
•  Immersive Missions with unique VR aiming Control with Haptic Rumble feedback
•  Up to 4 players linked play
•  5 Levels in different exotic environments with Final Level to face the BOSS
•  2 Game Modes:
– Single-play
– Multi-play
•  Game Difficulties: Easy and Normal and Hard
•  Air cannon system for enhanced VR experience
•  Full LED illuminated Cabinet

Here is a video that I grabbed from the website linked above; 3MW doesn’t appear to have any kind of YouTube channel and Sega haven’t posted anything either yet, so this will suffice for now:

As IAAPA gets closer, I will be doing a full IAAPA preview video, and of course I’ll have footage of anything that is allowed to be captured (back in 2019, they did not allow filming of MIA, sadly).

What do you think about these upcoming new Sega titles from what we know so far?